Pages

Search Products

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Nakba Obsession

THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL NARRATIVE IS THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE TO PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by Sol Stern

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — the specter of the Nakba.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word is "disaster"; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians' backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land's native people.

Every year, on the anniversary of Israel's independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948.

This would entail ending the "Zionist hegemony" and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees — not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well — would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it's also, as it happens, a myth — a radical distortion of history.

If words have any meaning, it is certainly accurate to describe the outcome of the 1948 war as a catastrophe for the Palestinians. Between 600,000 and 700,000 men, women, and children — even more, depending on who is telling the story — left their homes. Palestinian civil society disintegrated. At the war's end, the refugees dispersed to the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, and neighboring Arab countries. Many lived in tents, eking out a bare subsistence, and were then denied the right to return to their homes by the new State of Israel.

During the 1948 war and for many years afterward, the Western world — including the international Left — expressed hardly any moral outrage about the Palestinian refugees. This had nothing to do with Western racism or colonialism and much to do with recent history. The fighting in Palestine had broken out only two years after the end of the costliest military conflict ever, in which the victors exacted a terrible price on the losers.

By that, I don't mean the Nazi officials and their "willing executioners," who received less punishment than they deserved, but the 11 million ethnic Germans living in Central and Eastern Europe — civilians all — who were expelled from their homes and force-marched to Germany by the Red Army, with help from the Czech and Polish governments and with the approval of Roosevelt and Churchill. Historians estimate that 2 million died on the way. Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two new countries, India and Pakistan; millions of Hindus and Muslims moved from one to the other, and hundreds of thousands died in related violence. Against this background, the West was not likely to be troubled by the exodus of a little more than half a million Palestinians after a war launched by their own leaders.

In the 1940s, moreover, most of the international Left actually championed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was widely noted that the new state would be led by self-proclaimed socialists. Statehood for the Jews was supported by the Soviet Union and by the Truman administration's most progressive elements. The Palestinians were also compromised by the fact that their leader in 1948, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, had been a Nazi collaborator during the war.

In fact, I. F. Stone, the most revered left-wing journalist of the day, was one of the most influential American advocates for the Zionist cause. I have in my possession a book by Stone called This Is Israel, distributed by Boni and Gaer, a major commercial publisher at the time. The book, based on Stone's reporting during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, has become a collector's item by virtue of the fact that Stone's fans want to forget that it ever existed. Of the four adoring biographies of the great muckraker published in the last decade, only one even mentions that Stone wrote This Is Israel — and then shrugs off its significance in a few paragraphs.

It's obvious why the book would be embarrassing to today's leftist critics of Israel and Zionism. It opens with a foreword by Bartley Crum, the prominent American lawyer, businessman, and publisher of PM, the most widely read progressive newspaper of the 1940s. Crum evokes "the miracles [that the Israelis] have performed in peace and war.... They have built beautiful modern cities, such as Tel Aviv and Haifa on the edge of the wilderness.... They have set up a government which is a model of democracy." His friend and star correspondent, Izzy Stone, has "set down what he knows and what he has seen, simply, truthfully and eloquently."

We Americans, Crum concludes, "can, through this book, warm ourselves in the glory of a free people who made a two thousand year dream come true in their own free land."

Accompanied by famed war photographer Robert Capa's iconic images of male and female Israeli soldiers, Stone's text reads like a heroic epic. He writes of newborn Israel as a "tiny bridgehead" of 650,000 up against 30 million Arabs and 300 million Muslims and argues that Israel's "precarious borders," created by the United Nations' November 1947 partition resolution, are almost indefensible.

"Arab leaders made no secret of their intentions," Stone writes, and then quotes the head of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam: "This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades."

Palestinian leaders reminded Stone of the fascists he had fought with his pen since the Spanish Civil War. He ticks off the names of several Nazi collaborators prominent among the Arab military units that poured into Palestine after passage of the UN's resolution. In addition to the grand mufti, they included the head of the Arab Liberation Army, Fawzi el-Kaukji, who took part in the fascist revolt against the British in Iraq in 1940 and then escaped to Berlin, where he recruited Balkan Muslims for the Wehrmacht.

Another Palestinian military commander, Sheik Hassan Bey Salameh, was a "former staff officer under Rommel," Stone writes. "Salameh had last appeared in Palestine in 1944 when he was dropped as a Reichswehr major for sabotage duties." For good measure, Stone adds, "German Nazis, Polish reactionaries, Yugoslav Chetniks, and Bosnian Moslems flocked [into Palestine] for the war against the Jews."

And how does Stone explain the war's surprising outcome and the sudden exodus of the Palestinian Arabs? "Ill-armed, outnumbered, however desperate their circumstances, the Jews stood fast." The Palestinians, by contrast, began to run away almost as soon as the fighting began. "First the wealthiest families went," Stone recounts. "While the Arab guerrillas were moving in, the Arab civilian population was moving out."

Stone blames the grand mufti for giving explicit orders to the Palestinians to abandon Haifa, which had the largest Arab community of any city assigned to the Jewish state under the UN's partition plan.

What is most revealing about the book is the issue that Stone does not write about: the fate of the refugees after their exodus. Stone undoubtedly shared the conventional wisdom at the time: that wars inevitably produced refugees and that the problem was best handled by resettlement in the countries to which those refugees moved. Stone surely expected that the Arab countries to which the Palestinian refugees had moved would eventually absorb them as full citizens. That outcome wouldn't be perfect justice, but it would limit Palestinian suffering and open the doors to a reasonable and permanent settlement of the conflict.

Stone also knew that Israel was in the process of absorbing an almost equal number of impoverished Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, most of whom had been forced out of their homes and lost all their property in places where they had lived for hundreds of years.

A Jewish refugee from an Arab country arrives in Israel, 1949.Stone could never have foreseen that for the next 62 years, the Palestinians would remain in those terrible refugee camps — not just in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but in Lebanon, Syria, and present-day Jordan as well. Nor could Stone have imagined that not one Arab country would move to absorb the refugees and offer them citizenship, or that the Palestinians' leaders would insist on keeping the refugees locked up in the camps for the purpose of dramatizing their Nakba narrative.

Stone's reporting on the 1948 war has turned out to be a pretty decent "first rough draft of history," to quote publisher Philip Graham's definition of journalism.

But that's a judgment that Stone himself discarded, as the Left gradually abandoned Israel over the next 30 years and accepted the Palestinians' portrayal of their nakba as the Nakba — a capitalized instance of world-historical evil.

In Stone's later writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was at pains to forget what he had said in This Is Israel. Moving in lockstep with the Left, he had turned into a scathing critic of Israel by 1967, castigating the Zionists for "moral myopia" and lack of compassion in The New York Review of Books. His turnabout was so complete that by 1979, the West's foremost champion of the Palestinians, Edward Said, paid homage to Stone and to Noam Chomsky as two of the few Jewish intellectuals who had "tried to see what Zionism did to the Palestinians not just once in 1948, but over the years." The Columbia University scholar obviously didn't know about, or didn't want to know about, This Is Israel.

Revisionist historiography also appeared to nullify Stone's earlier journalism. Starting in the mid-1980s, a group of self-styled "new historians" in Israel began debunking (or to use their favorite term, "deconstructing") the official "Zionist narrative" about the 1948 war and the foundation of the state.

The most influential of the revisionist historians was Benny Morris, whose 1987 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem became an international sensation. Using a trove of documents in the Israeli state archives, Morris showed that not all the Palestinian refugees fled their homes in panic or were ordered out by their leaders. For example, during fierce battles between Israeli and Arab forces around the strategic towns of Lydda and Ramla, the Israelis expelled thousands of Arab residents and put them on the road to the West Bank. Morris also presented documented cases of atrocities by some Israeli soldiers and revealed that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had discussed the feasibility of "transferring" Arabs out of the areas assigned to the Jewish state by the UN.

Yet unlike most of his left-wing revisionist colleagues, Morris asserted that the Palestinian calamity and the refugee problem were "born of war, not by design."

Morris was — and is — a committed Zionist of the Left.

He believed that his work as a truth-telling historian might have a healing effect, encouraging Palestinian intellectuals to own up to their own side's mistakes and crimes. The process might lead to some reconciliation, perhaps even to peace. But Morris was shocked when Palestinian leaders launched the second intifada, with its campaign of suicide bombings, just as President Clinton offered them a generous two-state solution at Camp David. Morris was also dismayed to discover that his scholarship on the 1948 war was being used by Palestinian activists and Western leftist academics to build up the Nakba myth.

In a 2008 letter to the Irish Times, he wrote:

Israel-haters are fond of citing — and more often, mis-citing — my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections.... In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947, [the Palestinians] launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.... On the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities....

Most of Palestine's 700,000 "refugees" fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops.

The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became "refugees" — and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee) — was not a "racist crime"... but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.

Coming from the dean of Israeli revisionist historians, this was a significant rejection of the Nakba narrative and, incidentally, an endorsement of Stone's forgotten book.

Earlier this year, another pathbreaking work of historical scholarship appeared that, if facts mattered at all in this debate, would put the final nail in the coffin of the Nakba myth. The book is Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East program at King's College London. Karsh has delved deeper into the British and Israeli archives — and some Arab ones — than any previous historian of the period. He deftly uses this new material to seal the case that the Nakba was, to a large extent, brought on by the Palestinians' own leaders.

For example, using detailed notes kept by key players in Haifa, Karsh provides a poignant description of an April 1948 meeting attended by Haifa's Arab officials, officers of the nascent Israeli military, Mayor Shabtai Levy, and Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British military commander of Haifa.

Levy, in tears, begged the Arab notables, some of whom were his personal friends, to tell their people to stay in their homes and promised that no harm would befall them.

The Zionists desperately wanted the Arabs of Haifa to stay put in order to show that their new state would treat its minorities well. However, exactly as Stone reported in This Is Israel, the Arab leaders told Levy that they had been ordered out and even threatened by the Arab Higher Committee, chaired by the grand mufti from his exile in Cairo. Karsh quotes the hardly pro-Zionist Stockwell as telling the Arab leaders, "You have made a foolish decision."

In describing the battle for Jaffa, the Arab city adjoining Tel Aviv, Karsh uses British military archives to show that the Israelis again promised the Arabs that they could stay if they laid down their arms. But the mufti's orders again forbade it. In retrospect, it is clear that the mufti wanted the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa to leave because he feared not that they would be in danger but that their remaining would provide greater legitimacy to the fledgling Jewish state.

Unfortunately, no amount of documentation and evidence about what really happened in 1948 will puncture the Nakba narrative.

The tale of dispossession has been institutionalized now, an essential part of the Palestinians' armament for what they see as the long struggle ahead. It has become the moral basis for their insistence on the refugees' right to return to Israel, which in turn leads them to reject one reasonable two-state peace plan after another. In the meantime, the more radical Palestinians continue to insist that the only balm for the Nakba is the complete undoing of the historical crime of Zionism — either eliminating Israel or submerging it into a secular democratic state called Palestine. (The proposal is hard to take seriously from adherents of a religion and a culture that abjure secularism and allow little democracy.)

Nor will the facts about 1948 impress the European and American leftists who are part of the international Nakba coalition. The Nakba narrative of Zionism as a movement of white colonial oppressors victimizing innocent Palestinians is strengthened by radical modes of thought now dominant in the Western academy. Postmodernists and postcolonialists have adapted Henry Ford's adage that "history is bunk" to their own political purposes.

According to the radical professors, there is no factual or empirical history that we can trust — only competing "narratives." For example, there is the dominant establishment narrative of American history, and then there is the counter-narrative, written by professors like the late Howard Zinn, which speaks for neglected and forgotten Americans. Just so, the Palestinian counter-narrative of the Nakba can now replace the old, discredited Zionist narrative, regardless of actual historical facts. And thanks to what the French writer Pascal Bruckner has called the Western intelligentsia's new "tyranny of guilt" — a self-effacement that forbids critical inquiry into the historical narratives of those national movements granted the sanctified status of "oppressed" — the Nakba narrative cannot even be challenged.

This makes for a significant subculture in the West devoted to the delegitimization of Israel and the Zionist idea.

To leftists, for whom Israel is now permanently on trial, Stone's 1948 love song to Zionism has conveniently been disappeared, just as Trotsky was once disappeared by the Soviet Union and its Western supporters (of whom, let us not forget, Stone was one). Thus Tony Judt can write in The New York Review of Books — the same prestigious journal in which Stone began publishing his reconsiderations of Zionism — that Israel is, after all, just an "anachronism" and a historical blunder.

Several years ago, I briefly visited the largest refugee camp in the West Bank: Balata, inside the city of Nablus. Many of the camp's approximately 20,000 residents are the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of the Arab citizens of Jaffa who fled their homes in early 1948.

The Palestinian Authority does not consider the residents of Balata citizens of Palestine; they do not vote on municipal issues, and they receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation. The refugee children — though after 60 years, calling young children "refugees" is absurd — go to separate schools run by UNRWA, the UN's refugee-relief agency. The "refugees" are crammed into an area of approximately one square kilometer, and municipal officials prohibit them from building outside the camp's official boundaries, making living conditions ever more cramped as the camp's population grows. In a building called the Jaffa Cultural Center — financed by the UN, which means our tax dollars — Balata's young people are undoubtedly nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors' homes by the Mediterranean Sea.

In Balata, history has come full circle.

During the 1948 war, Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini insisted that the Arab citizens of Haifa and Jaffa had to leave, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state. Now, the descendants of those citizens are locked up in places like Balata and prohibited from resettling in the Palestinian-administered West Bank — again, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state, this time by removing the Palestinians' chief complaint. Yet there is a certain perverse logic at work here.

For if Israel and the Palestinians ever managed to hammer out the draft of a peace treaty, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, would have to go to Balata and explain to its residents that their leaders have been lying to them for 60 years and that they are not going back to Jaffa. Which, to state the obvious again, is one of the main reasons that there has been no peace treaty.

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

FOLLOWERS

Add Us on Facebook

Find Us on Twitter

Palestinian Identity Theft

Feature Video

Israel Should Make Peace With Whom?

Click HERE for more information

Description

Israel wants peace... and is willing to sacrifice a large portion of its homeland to end the conflict. Here are three clear points that highlight Israel's commitment to peace and shared Western values.

Favorite Quotes About Israel & Palestine

REMEMBER: ISRAEL IS BAD!
ITS EXISTENCE KEEPS REMINDING MUSLIMS WHAT A BUNCH OF LOSERS THEY ARE.

1) "Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good Lord, historically, it is really your country." ~ Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, Mayor of Jerusalem, in 1899. ~

2) "We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.... We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home... our two movements compliment one another." ~ Emir Faisal, a leader of the Arab world, in 1919. ~

3) Throughout his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: terrorist or peace maker) Arafat asserts at least a dozen times:
"The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."
~ Yasser Arafat ~

4) “We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. . . . We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.”
~ Yasser Arafat ~

5) "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel.
We are preparing for an all out war, a war which will last for generations.
~Yasser Arafat~

6) "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel. For our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of Palestinian people, since Arab national interest demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism".
~ Zahir Muhse'in, Member PLO Executive and the hoax of "Palestinian" identity - March 31, 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper "Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw"~

7) "There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it".
- Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British
Peel Commission, 1937 -

9) "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria".
- Representant of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956

10) Concerning the Holy Land, the chairman of the Syrian Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919 stated: "The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 c.e. hardly lasted, as such, 22 years".

11) " There is no Palestinian nation! There is an Arab nation, but no Palestinian nation. This was invented by the colonial powers. When are the Palestinians mentioned in history? Never." ~ Azmi Bishara, former Arab Knesset member, on Israel television. ~

12) "There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilea); not for thirty miles in either direction... One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee... Nazareth is forlorn... Jericho lies a mouldering ruin... Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds... a silent, mournful expanse... a desolation... We never saw a human being on the whole route... Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes... desolate and unlovely...".
- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad", 1867 -

13) "In 1590 a 'simple English visitor' to Jerusalem wrote: 'Nothing there is to bescene but a little of the old walls, which is yet remayning and all the rest is grasse, mosse and weedes much like to a piece of rank or moist grounde'.".
- Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund,
Quarterly Statement, p. 86; de Haas, History, p. 338 -

14) "The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil".
- British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s -

15) "Palestine is a ruined and desolate land".
- Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian -

16) "The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it".
- Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s -

17) "Then we entered the hill district, and our path lay through the clattering bed of an ancient stream, whose brawling waters have rolled away into the past, along with the fierce and turbulent race who once inhabited these savage hills. There may have been cultivation here two thousand years ago. The mountains, or huge stony mounds environing this rough path, have level ridges all the way up to their summits; on these parallel ledges there is still some verdure and soil: when water flowed here, and the country was thronged with that extraordinary population, which, according to the Sacred Histories, was crowded into the region, these mountain steps may have been gardens and vineyards, such as we see now thriving along the hills of the Rhine. Now the district is quite deserted, and you ride among what seem to be so many petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole course of the ride".
- William Thackeray in "From Jaffa To Jerusalem", 1844 -

18) "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population".
- James Finn, British Consul in 1857 -

29) "The area was underpopulated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880's, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained "The Holy Land" in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants - both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts... Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen... The plows used were of wood... The yields were very poor... The sanitary conditions in the village [Yabna] were horrible... Schools did not exist... The rate of infant mortality was very high... The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert... The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants".
- The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913 -

So the concepts "Palestinians" and "Palestinian People" and "Palestinian nation" and "Palestinian national self-determination" and "historical Palestine" are all hoaxes to facilitate the Arab terrorist destruction
of Israel. What does that tell us about what possible solutions to the conflict may work?..and what does it tell us about what will NOT work?

Favorite Quotes About Jordan IS Palestine

Here are several quotes from "officials" in the so-called Palestinian community. LET THEM SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES!!!!

1) "We are the Government of Palestine, the army of Palestine and the refugees of Palestine."
~ The Prime Minister of Jordan, Hazza' al-Majali, August 23,1959 ~

2) "Palestine and Transjordan are one, for Palestine is the coastline and Transjordan the hinterland of the same country."
~ King Abdullah, at the Meeting of the Arab League, Cairo, 12th April 1948 ~

3) "Let us not forget the East Bank of the (River) Jordan, where seventy per cent of the inhabitants belong to the Palestinian nation."
~ George Habash, leader of the PFLP section of the PLO, writing in the PLO publication Sha-un Falastinia, February 1970

4) "Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is Palestine; there is one people and one land, with one history and one and the same fate."
~ Prince Hassan, brother of King Hussein, addressing the Jordanian National Assembly, 2nd February 1970 ~

5) "There is no family on the East Bank of the river (Jordan) that does not have relatives on the West Bank ... no family in the west that does not have branches in the east."
~ King Hussein, addressing the Jordanian National Assembly, 2nd February 1972 ~

6) "We consider it necessary to clarify to one and all, in the Arab world and outside, that the PALESTINIAN PEOPLE with its nobility and conscience is to be found HERE on the EAST Bank The WEST Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its overwhelming majority is HERE and nowhere else."
~ King Hussein, quoted in An-Hahar, Beirut, 24th August 1972 ~

7) "The Palestinians here constitute not less than one half of the members of the armed forces. They and their brothers, the sons of Transjordan, constitute the members of one family who are equal in everything, in rights and duties." (Quoted by BBC Monitoring Service)
~ King Hussein, on Amman Radio, 3rd February 1973 ~

8) "There are, as well, links of geography and history, and a wide range of interests between the two Banks (of the River Jordan) which have grown stronger over the past twenty years. Let us not forget that el-Salt and Nablus were within the same district - el-Balka - during the Ottoman period, and that family and commercial ties bound the two cities together."
~ Hamdi Ken'an, former Mayor of Nablus, writing in the newspaper Al-Quds, 14th March 1973 ~

9) "The new Jordan, which emerged in 1949, was the creation of the Palestinians of the West Bank and their brothers in the East. While Israel was the negation of the Palestinian right of self-determination, unified Jordan was the expression of it."
~ Sherif Al-Hamid Sharaf, Representative of Jordan at the UN Security Council, 11th June 1973 ~

10) Past "President Bourguiba (of Tunisia) considers Jordan an artificial creation presented by Great Britain to King Abdullah. But he accepts Palestine and the Palestinians as an existing and primary fact since the days of the Pharaohs. Israel, too, he considers as a primary entity. However, Arab history makes no distinction between Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians. Most of them hail from the same Arab race, which arrived in the region with the Arab Moslem conquest."
~ Editorial Comment in the Jordanian Armed Forces' weekly, Al-Aqsa, Amman, 11th July 1973 ~

11) "With all respect to King Hussein, I suggest that the Emirate of Transjordan was created from oil cloth by Great Britain, which for this purpose cut up ancient Palestine. To this desert territory to the bast of the Jordan (River)., it gave the name Transjordan. But there is nothing in history which carries this name. While since our earliest time there was Palestine and Palestinians. I maintain that the matter of Transjordan is an artificial one, and that Palestine is the basic problem. King Hussein should submit to the wishes of the people, in accordance with the principles of democracy and self-determination, so as-to avoid the fate of his grandfather, Abdullah, or of his cousin, Feisal, both of whom were assassinated."
~ Past President Bourguiba of Tunisia, in a public statement, July 1973 ~

12) "The Palestinians and the Jordanians have created on this soil since 1948 one family - all of whose children have equal rights and obligations."
~ King Hussein, addressing an American Delegation, 19th February 1975 ~

13) "How much better off Hussein would be if he had been induced to abandon his pose as a benevolent 'host' to 'refugees' and to affirm the fact that Jordan is the Palestinian Arab nation-state, just as Israel is the Palestinian Jewish nation-state."
~ Editorial Comment in the publication The Economist of 19th July 1975 ~

14) "Palestine and Jordan were both (by then) under British Mandate, but as my grandfather pointed out in his memoirs, they were hardly separate countries. Transjordan being to the east of the River Jordan, it formed in a sense, the interior of Palestine."
~ King Hussein, writing in his Memoirs ~

15) "Those fishing in troubled waters will not succeed in dividing our people, which extends to both sides of the (River) Jordan, in spite of the artificial boundaries established by the Colonial Office and Winston Churchill half a century ago."
~ Yassir Arafat, in a statement to Eric Roleau ~

16) "Palestinian Arabs hold seventy-five per cent of all government jobs in Jordan."
~ The Sunday newspaper The Observer of 2nd March 1976 ~

17) "Palestinian Arabs control over seventy per cent of Jordan's economy."
~ The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram of 5th March 1976 ~

18) "There should be a kind of linkage because Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people."
~ Farouk Kadoumi, head of the PLO Political Department, quoted in Newsweek, 14th March 1977 ~

19) "Along these lines, the West German Der Spiegel magazine this month cited Dr George Habash, leader of one of the Palestinian organizations, as saying that 70 per cent of Jordan's population are Palestinians and that the power in Jordan should be seized." (Translated by BBC Monitoring Service)
~ From a commentary which was broadcast by Radio Amman, 30th June 1980 ~

20) "Jordan is not just another Arab state with regard to Palestine but, rather, Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan in terms of territory, national identity, sufferings, hopes and aspirations, both day and night. Though we are all Arabs and our point of departure is that we are all members of the same people, the Palestinian-Jordanian nation is one and unique, and different from those of the other Arab states."
~ Marwan al Hamoud, member of the Jordanian National Consultative Council and former Minister of Agriculture, quoted by Al Rai, Amman, 24th September 1980 ~

21) "The potential weak spot in Jordan is that most of the population are not, strictly speaking, Jordanian at all, but Palestinian. An estimated 60 per cent of the country's 2,500,000 people are Palestinians ... Most of these hold Jordanian passports, and many are integrated into Jordanian society."
~ Richard Owen, in an article published in The Times, 14th November 1980 ~

22) "There is no moral justification for a second Palestine."
~ The Freeman Center (September 3, 1993) ~